Experiments on the automatic construction of hypertexts from texts

Abstract The problem of (semi-)automatically turning text into hypertext is one that has been identified as important to the growth and development of hypertext as a way of organising information. In this paper we describe an approach we have developed to semi-automatically generate a hypertext from linear texts. This is based on initially creating nodes and composite nodes composed of ‘mini-hypertexts’. Following this we then compute node-node similarity values using standard information retrieval techniques. These similarity measures are then used to selectively create node-node links based on the strength of similarity between nodes. What makes our process novel is that the link creation process also uses values from a dynamically computed metric which measures the topological compactness of the overall hypertext being generated. Thus link creation is a selective process based not only on node-node similarity but also on the overall layout of the hypertext. Experiments on generating a hypertext from a ...

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